AudioQuest ThunderBird ZERO Full-Range / Treble Speaker Cable (Pair)

A 10-gauge PSC+ cable to be used alone (full-range), or in combination with the Thunderbird BASS cable in a biwire setup

With the introduction of the Mythical Creatures series of speaker cables, AudioQuest has pushed significantly beyond even its own very high standards. William Low, working alongside Garth Powell (the same team who birthed last year’s groundbreaking new series of AudioQuest AC power cables), have created what are simply the most transparent, get-out-of-the-way immersive speaker cables ever made.

The Mythical Creatures series—ThunderBird, FireBird, and Dragon—are not merely an incremental evolution; their introduction represents a category advance in speaker cable design. Building on a solid base of familiar AQ technologies, Garth and Bill specifically focused on addressing one of the most vexing issues plaguing speaker cable design: the mismatch between the amplifier’s source impedance and the speaker’s load impedance.

All previous attempts to address this issue chose to move the speaker cable’s characteristic impedance to a value closer to the nominal impedance of the speakers. All such attempts failed because a speaker’s impedance changes with frequency, and the amplifier’s output impedance is something else altogether. By eliminating the Mythical Creatures speaker cable’s characteristic impedance, current compression and distortion of the signal (current) transient is significantly reduced. The result is dynamic contrast, transient response, and bass slam that are rendered seemingly without effort.

These new Mythical Creatures ZERO speaker cables may be used in one of two ways: either as ideal Full-Range cables, or, in combination with a dedicated BASS cable in a BiWire cable assembly of unparalleled performance. ThunderBird, FireBird, and Dragon BASS cables incorporate our patented common-mode noise-rejection technology, yielding audibly dramatic additional reason to BiWire when possible.

Whether AudioQuest’s new Mythical Creatures speaker cables are used as Full-Range or BiWire, the beautiful sonic result is the sound of your amplifier doing its job unmolested by either current-compression or radio frequency noise.

Note: Often, the choice between terminating your speaker cables with spade lugs or banana plugs will come down to personal preference — AudioQuest spades and bananas use the same base metal, the same superior plating, and no metal-to metal junctions, resulting in equal quality parts. However, the EU-compliant isolated binding posts used on some power amplifiers often makes it difficult if not impossible to tighten spade lugs with high torque or pressure. In these applications, the AudioQuest banana connector is the superior choice, and may be the only choice

Specifications

Metal: Solid perfect-surface copper plus (PSC+)

Gauge: 10 AWG

Geometry: ZERO Tech

Noise-dissipation (ZERO, BASS): Multi-layer carbon based